Automatic cooking apparatus typically comprise a microprocessor controlled series of food storage compartments and a cooking vessel. Typically, a plurality of ingredient storage store various different ingredients, and a computer program is used to specify schedules for dispensing the ingredients from the storage compartments into a cooking vessel.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,649,810 to Wong shows one such apparatus. The Wong arrangement includes a carousal of ingredient storage vessels which rotates and dispenses ingredients into a pot which may then be heated. Additionally, Wong provides apparatus for stirring the ingredients as they cook.
An additional prior art patent describing computerized cooking is U.S. Pat. No. 5,386,762 issued to Gokey. In the Gokey arrangement, robotics are employed to select a food item, place it on a cooking area for cooking, and turn and remove the food at an appropriate time. Gokey is suitable for cooking, for example, meat, poultry, or fish.
The aforementioned two prior art patents, as well as numerous other prior art directed to the same technology, are extremely primitive and only suited for a very small number of food items. For example, in Wong, due to the carousel design of the ingredient storage compartments, once a food item is heated, it may not be automatically removed from the heat. Rather, other ingredients may be added and the total mixture further cooked. Moreover, only one heating element and cooking vessel may be used. Since the arrangement of the cooking vessel and storage compartments does not allow mixing of items after cooking. Thus, recipes calling for some ingredients to be boiled and others sauted would be impossible to make.
The Gokey arrangement is capable of little more than placing strips of meat or similar items on a grill, and then removing them. Additionally, Gokey requires a complicated set of robotics, making it expensive and unsuitable for home use.
In view of the above, there exists a need in the art for a more versatile cooking apparatus which can cook and dispense various solid and liquid ingredients, and which can provide for cooking items which are more complicated then simply mixing ingredients in a single pot and heating them at a desired temperature or simply placing items on a grill.